Breaking the Silence

It has been a while since I last posted a personal message on the chat and blog. Some of you have reached out to ask what was going on; Utami reminded me that you are all here because of me and that I have to play my part of the deal. The truth is that since I have been back on land and stepped out of the race, I felt ill at ease talking to you all: as if by stepping out, I had lost my reason to keep you on this journey of mine.

Let me try to repair this long silence .

First about my health: I am well. My ribcage is pretty much fixed and I feel perfectly fine. The only thing that keeps me from sailing really is the small hematoma on my liver that, while not impairing liver function, does take time to heal. Doctors have told me that while I can exercise and go about life as before, I need to ensure that I don’t get another shock on the liver until it is fully healed. As you know by now, our boat is pretty violent especially upwind in heavy weather, and avoiding such shock is not something I can guarantee. And so I stepped away for a while. While rib and liver are fine, I am more bothered by the finger I damaged by pulling it sideways when bringing in the yankee during a drop in the Bay of Biscay. Believe it or not, while nothing is broken (I got 2 X-rays of my hand), this finger still has not healed and I am using a rubber bands to progressively regain flexion as per doctor instructions. All in all, I will be all ready physically to race in a couple of months.

Will I be ready mentally? That is a different matter. I went thru a pretty tough time after I had injured myself on the way to Punta del Este. The last two weeks on board being injured felt very long indeed. Obviously, I was in quite a bit of pain, especially once we started to go back upwind in heavy weather, slamming continuously in the waves. But what made it really difficult was to be out of the watch system, being in effect cut from the crew. Do not get me wrong, most crew members were really gracious about it and very supportive; But seeing people struggle, work hard, get tired. sleep, and get back on deck, while I was idle was mentally challenging. Because of my damaged ribs, I was not able to sleep or stay in the medical bunk (it was too painful), so instead, I lived t24/7 on the seatee next to to the galley, observing the going in and out of the crew non stop. Marieke who spend a few days unable to work in the subsequent leg, told me the same occurred to her. She was more bothered by this feeling of isolation than the pain in her damaged foot.

In Punta, I spent my time going back and forth to the hospitals, again letting the crew deal with the maintenance and victualing. I was actually quite relieved to leave Punta and be away from it all. I have now been off for a month, and I have not been able to shake this feeling of relief. I have followed a bit what’s happening on board, talk to several of the crew members doing their stop in Cape Town, but I am struggling to get back in the mood and the excitement of sailing.

Stepping back a bit, I put a lot of energy, money and effort into getting ready for this race, and demanded a lot of understanding from my family, and my expectations were very high. The reality is that even before I inured myself, the reality of the race did not match those expectations. Somehow, I was and remain underwhelmed. Underwhelmed by the speed limitation of these yachts (too heavy, not stiff enough), underwhelmed by the low level of readiness of the yacht on day 1 and the amount of work, maintenance we had to dedicate, disappointed that instrument were not calibrated, polars not accurate, and so many more. Truly, it felt often like this was the first time these boots were raced across the world!

So I am disappointed. I am now more excited about spending the next few months including Christmas and new year celebration with my family, rather than racing! I do miss my crew members.

I am motivating myself to go back to racing in a few months. I aim to restart in China for the remaining half of the race. I feel an obligation to meet my fellow crew mates, especially the one form my watch going around the world and my two good friends Ned and Martin also joining in China. Hopefully I can rebuild my excitement during this time.

I’ll see how this goes. Thank you all for continuing to support me!